Bill Maher And Congressman Give Tea Partier Lesson In Obamacare

 

President Obama and his administration should consider adding Congressman Alan Grayson as their spokesperson for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). After Bill Maher corrected the record in which many are led to believe that most people hate Obamacare. Turns out within that batch of people who do not like Obamacare are those who think it did not go far enough. They wanted a single payer system. Rep. Grayson used sixty seconds to explain the deficiency of the private insurance system that Democrats chose to appease unfettered free market capitalist, to empathetically describe the benefits of Obamacare personalizing it with his wife’s pre-existing condition, and to scold the Tea Party for their inhumanness in wanting these benefits gone.

Bill Maher: I want to correct this one idea they have, that Americans don’t like Obamacare, because I see this poll all the time. 54% of Americans are against Obamacare. Not really true, because 16% of that 54% want it to be more Left. They want single payer. So it’s really only 38% of the people who are on your team (Tea Party Team).
Matt Kibbe: I don’t think that’s right.
Bill Maher: No, that is right. Those are facts. We are not arguing opinion now. Those are the facts.
Rep. Alan Grayson: And these are people who recognize that there are fundamental, how should I put this, conflict of interest between you and your insurance company. Even if we switch to no government involvement at all, people would still get insurance and they would be in a situation where every time you needed care you would be taking money out of the pockets, the profit of your insurance company. And we haven’t taken a step beyond that. But Obamacare does do useful things. It’s put 4 million people who  are up to the age of 26 on the rolls by joining their parents’ plans. It’s closed 3/4 of the donut hole so seniors don’t have to choose between their medicines and pay their rent. It has taken 35 million people including my wife by the way, 35 million people who couldn’t get insurance because of pre-existing conditions, now they can. And now, insurance companies if you have expensive care can’t literally pull the plug on you when you are in a coma. Those are all good things. And those are all things that the Tea Party is desperate to eliminate.

A slight arithmetic correction needs to be made to Maher’s statement. He said 16% of the 54% who do not like Obamacare are those who want a system more to the Left. He should have said 16 of the 54 percentage points. Otherwise he undercounts those who want a more Left system.
To be sure, CNN/ORC has a more recent poll conducted between September 27 and 29th that corroborates Maher’s assertion though the numbers are slightly different. In this poll 38% favor Obamacare while 57% oppose the law. The same dynamics is apparent. 11% oppose the bill because it’s not Liberal enough. In other words 49% like Obamacare or want a more Liberal Obamacare while 46% do not.
Early on in the program Maher showed some interviews that make it obvious that most of the information most people could recite were the provable lies and misinformation spouted by Fox News, Right Wing Radio, and Republicans that are given unfettered access to the airwaves for misinformation saturation. Based on early results those that get access to the real options in Obamacare are happy with the results. As such it is likely Obamacare will poll much higher as time goes by.